Sunday, May 31, 2015

TMNT (Vol. 4) #21

Publication date: April, 2005

Writing, lettering, inking, toning: Peter Laird

Layouts, penciling: Jim Lawson

Inking: Eric Talbot

Cover painting: Michael Dooney

Production assistance: Dan Berger

Summary:

Mikey awakens in a dungeon populated with aliens and finds
himself chained to a wall by an unbreakable molecular cable. A Styraccodon tells him he’s in Royal
Detention Center 17, a “black hole” prison where the Styraccodon’s send those they
don’t want anyone to ever see or hear from again. Mike insists that it’s all a
misunderstanding, that the Regenta will set things right, but an elderly, blind
Triceraton named Azokk warns him not to get his hopes up.

On the tepui, Glyminal tells Don that the Reptilians must
be exterminated if they’re to have any chance of escaping. Don suggests that instead of wiping out a
sentient species, they instead use the shrinking ray on them so they can live
out their live harmlessly in the habitrail.
Glyminal likes the idea and he and Don return to the habitrail to inform
the explorers.

The humans are currently in a battle with the Reptilian
that was brought into the habitrail unconscious with Donatello. Glyminal uses the shrink ray on it and it
falls into a river and begins happily hunting fish instead of people.

Down in the lair, Leo fits the mutated Raph with a new
belt, though the bandana looks too silly on him to wear. Leo checks out some fresh katana from the
armory to replace the ones Three Moon Janguar broke, though Raph laments that
he’s now too big to use his sai. As they
walk and talk, they mention that Mikey hasn’t returned to the Moon Island for
his next tour guide assignment and risks getting fired. Leo suggests Mikey just took Casey’s bike for
a spin and lost track of time.

They meet up with the Fugitoid, who is using Don’s
portable gene analyzer to check on Raph’s condition. He informs Raph that he will no longer
continue to mutate, but because his system has stabilized, he won’t be
returning to normal, either. Raph wants
to get revenge on the “vampires” who did this to him and the Fugitoid informs
him that the Kurtzburg Memorial officials have been on the case, but with no
luck.

Back at the tepui, Glyminal returns all the humans and
Utroms to their natural heights so they can go home. However, when he tries the ray on Don, it
doesn’t work. He figures that Don’s
unique mutant genetics are causing the problem, while Don isn’t too happy about
being stuck in his shrunken state.

On a rooftop in Springfield, Casey asks April why she’s
suddenly taken on the identity of Nobody. April says that after seeing what
Renet showed her about her origins, she felt like “nobody” was the only
identity she deserved. Casey begs her to
be honest with him and tell him what happened.
Realizing he deserves the truth, April starts to tell him a story…

The story arcs are all sort of shifting gears right now;
the ones that were more exciting are slowing down while the ones that were
tedious are ratcheting up. It’s
perfectly fine, as they can’t ALL be in action-mode all the time, and having
them switch speeds at different intervals means we aren’t stuck with an “all-dialogue”
or “all-action” issue.

Well, except for Don’s arc. That shit has been nothing BUT tedious and it’s
never gonna get any better. But I’ll do
these in order.

Mikey’s stuck in space-jail, doing space-time for his
space-crimes and it doesn’t look like he’ll be getting space-parole anytime
soon. I love Mikey’s arc in Volume 4, and
while I was cool with the rather long stretch of romance between him and Seri
(the Regenta), I’m glad that it’s getting to the exciting part. He’s going to be stuck in that hole for a
while, but the tension builds steadily and some of the other alien prisoners
will turn out to be interesting short-lived cast members. Azokk has a wonderfully creepy design by
Lawson and he’s one of my favorites of the named Triceratons in the series (up
there with Zule and Zog).

And NOW we get to Don’s bit. The fight with the Reptilian on the log
spanning the moat should have been exciting, but the tiresome explanatory
dialogue and the Reptillian’s stupid Gollum-speak effectively suck all the
energy out of it. Prior to that, four pages are spent
with Donatello explaining to Glyminal that they should just shrink the
Reptilians and, again, it takes the LONGEST route to describe the simplest concept. Also, really?
The Venezuelan Utroms couldn’t come up with that complex strategy on
their own? “Shrink the Reptilians”? Jeez, this doesn’t make Donatello look smart
so much as it makes the Utroms look like simpletons.

Oh yeah, and Don’s stuck at 6-inches or thereabouts. It’s been 10 years and he’s still that
size. Don’t expect any closure on that
rather random dilemma anytime soon.

Although it IS interesting. In this issue, Laird writes an extremely
lengthy rebuttal in the letters column to a fan asking him why he couldn’t find
some way to reincorporate the events of the Image TMNT Volume 3 series into
Mirage continuity. Laird, both
delicately and not-so-much, explains that the Image series didn’t “feel right”
and having it in continuity would distract and bother him, even if he never
called back to it. He didn’t care for
where Carlson took the characters and didn’t want to try and fix the various
mutilations the Turtles underwent, so he felt it was best to just forget the
whole thing ever happened.

Yeah, he didn’t care for one-eyed Raph, one-handed Leo or
cyborg Donatello. But mutated Gameraph
and shrunken (soon to be piloting a robot body) Donatello? Aces.

The Leo arc, which had been the most fascinating of the
storylines next to Mike’s, hits slow-motion for now. Leo spends a really long time talking about
their armory and why they have back-up weapons at the ready, as if we couldn’t
figure that out on our own. I did like
how he and Raph took time to talk about Mikey’s whereabouts, at least
intimating that they’re curious about where their bro is (rather than just
plain forgetting about him). The Leo arc
is going to pick back up again, but I don’t think that’ll happen for a
while.

Raph’s arc is pretty much over
and done with save for the formality of returning him to normal, so I won’t
have much to say about him for the rest of these reviews.

And lastly, we have April and Casey. April’s decision to become Nobody will amount
to nothing; her melodramatic but cryptic explanation as to why she took the
name is all we’ll get. It was dumb. But rather than talk about April and dumb
storylines, I’ll save that for the next review.
It’ll be a doozy.

2 comments:

Anonymous
said...

God has it really been 10 years? Shit, everytime I think about this stuff it makes me feel old. Its hard to believe the early 2000's aren't just "5 years ago" like I think they are....but more like over a decade ago.

I feel like I'm still stuck in the year 2006 or something, I can't believe all this Volume 4 stuff is so old now.